My blog on Gadgets and the like

Xiaomi Miband fitness tracker mini review

My good friend Lance was wandering through a park and tripped over one of these, so he gave it to me to play with. Searching the web says it’s not uncommon for these to become parted from their owners. Like most other trackers it does not alert you when it becomes disconnected from the phone. Also like other trackers, when you link a found tracker up with your phone it makes no attempt to reunite it with it’s former owner.

The MiBand (first gen) is a super cheap, Chinese activity tracker, think like $20 on Amazon. And it looks every bit as cheap as it is IMHO. So let’s see what we have. Delving into the app you find some interesting artifacts of Chinese all over the place. And it seems China has no idea Canada is a country when you go to setup it’s region. Ok so I guess I’m an American? Setup requires you to give it your phone number and a password to create an account. It then sends you a text with a passcode you enter and your done. Then you enter the usual handful of personal stats, age, sex, weight height etc. The app kept finding a firmware update was needed but it kept failing with no hint of why.

Like other activity trackers it tracks steps (which get converted into kms and calories) and sleep. Interestingly the calories do not include basal calories (active calories only), something I wish others would do. There is no move reminder. As an example Mi Vs Fitbit Flex: Steps 14519 vs 16230 (-11%), Kms 10.5 Vs 11.95 (-12%) calorie count is 580 Vs 2634, but when you remove basal of 1200 it compares with 1434. So other than calories the Mi does an admiral job of step counting. Especially when you include the price!

Sleep tracking is extremely basic and only tells you the time you were in bed and the time you were in deep sleep with light sleep being the left over. Nothing about how many times you were restless etc.
Comparing the Mi to Fitbit flex time in bed: 6.3 hrs Vs 6.9 (-9%). Again not a bad at all.

There does not seem to be a portal to view your stats on, so your limited to it on your device, I also see no way to export the data. The data can be fed into Apple health, a nice surprise and something Fitbit choose to not do.

Notifications (on an iPhone) for phone calls and alarms can be turned on in which case it vibrates quite noticeably, but the default is this is off, and no other notificatons come through to the tracker. Likely to preserve battery life.

There is a find your tracker function, in which case it buzzes if it is in bluetooth range.

The Mi unlike the Fitbits tell you clearly when you last charged it and the exact battery percentage. In 2days it went down a mere 8% which would project out to 25 days which is HUGELY impressive. My Flex gets about 7.

The app is basic, there’s no portal, and no way to export but if your looking for a budget tracker this is a much better choice than I anticipated. If they added full notifications it would present an additional use case for the device.